Barefoot Sisters: Southbound

by Lucy Letcher;Susan Letcher

  All weekend, I had worried in the back of my mind about finding a ride to the Trail. Brian had taken off on Sunday afternoon, wishing us luck and pulling off the field in his duct-taped silver station wagon. Monday morning rolled around, leaving the campsite under four inches of thick snow, and we still didn't have a ride lined up. I had gathered a few leads, or people who might be able to take us within several hundred miles of our destination, but nothing definite.

  As I brushed snow off the tent, wondering what to do next, I heard a familiar voice. "Isis! Jackrabbit!" A tall, slender woman with short brown hair was dashing across the field.

  "Stitches! How are you?"

  "I'm great! How are you guys doing?"

  "Pretty decent" I collapsed the tent, shaking the last snow from the purple nylon, and folded up the poles. "We're still looking for a ride, though"

  "Where are you going?"

  "Greenwood Lake. New York-New Jersey border."

  "Man! You guys are way up there. You're going to hit some serious winter before you see ( Georgia"

  "Tell nee about it." I gestured to the field and the tent sites, blanketed in white. "You know anybody driving up that way?"

  "Oh, I can take you. I'm going to Boston"

  I hugged her. "Stitches, you're an angel! That's two we owe you."

  By the time we hit the trail again, the bruise on my heel had disappeared, and we could hike barefoot again. (The snow, apparently, had been a West Virginia phenomenon-the ground in New Jersey was still clear.) I was more cautious in placing my footsteps now than I had been before. I didn't want to risk having to leave the Trail again. It was chilly and the sky was gray, and almost all the leaves had fallen; we were alone and would probably be alone for months now. But I felt a new determination; we were a part of something, a larger community. The Gathering had given me the strength to continue.

  Isis

  oniewhere in New Jersey, shortly after the Gathering, we night-hiked for the first time. The sunset caught us at the end of a road walk, five miles from the nearest shelter at Pochuck Mountain.

  "This doesn't look like good stealthing ground," I said, eyeing the thickets on either side of the trail that, in the deepening twilight, looked suspiciously like poison ivy. "I guess we'll have to go on a ways"

  "Let's go to the shelter," said jackrabbit. "I've been wanting to night-hike ever since Badger told us about it at the Gathering"

  I remembered Anonymous Badger's description of night on the trail: the calls of nighthawks, the stars glinting through gaps in the leaves overhead, deer pausing in the flare of your headlamp. We don't have headlamps, I remembered.

  "What about light?" I asked jackrabbit.

  "We'll use our Photons if we need to," she said, flashing the thin white beam of the dime-sized flashlight, one of the advances in backpacking technology we'd discovered at the Gathering. "But the moonlight might be enough."

  She was right. The moon, only a few days from full, brightened as the last glimmers of daylight faded from the horizon, and its milky light was enough to reveal the slight indentation of the trail, striped with tree shadows. For a few miles we walked in silence over the smooth ground, letting our senses adapt to the darkness. A barred owl called in the distance, and its breathy uvoo- iiWoo, u'oo-u'oooriu' seemed to echo across the still forest-another owl was answering. Close by us, a mouse or vole scurried through the leaves; farther oft I heard the sharp, regular rustle of a deer's hoof pawing the underbrush. As we crossed the edge of a Meadow, the rank odor of fox filled our nostrils. In places where the trail lay in deep shadow, the soles of our feet found the pebbly, dusty path between its borders of dried leaves and moss.

  At one point, the trees opened on our left, and we found ourselves on a cliff overlooking a valley. Overhead, the near stars shone dimly through the moonlight. Below us, clusters of lights marked the houses: orange of streetlights, rich yellow of windows, flickering blue of a TV screen.

  "It's strange how much light people use," jackrabbit whispered. "It looks like they've shut themselves tip in bubbles of daylight."

  "You sound like you're describing some foreign culture," I whispered back. It felt natural to lower our voices to the pitch of the forest twilight, the rustling of mice and the distant calls of birds.

  "I feel like I belong to a different culture now. An older, nomadic one. I feel like I belong to the woods and stars and not at all to the houses."

  A mile or so later, we came to the rocks. A whole jumbled hillside of them, ranging from fist-sized stones to boulders the size of tables with sharp uneven edges that glimmered faintly in the moonlight.

  "This could be interesting," I whispered to jackrabbit as I started down.

  "Interesting? Notchin' notchy, is what I'd call it" The five days we'd spent otf=trail had given her foot time to heal, but I knew how nervous she was about reinjuring it.

  In the first few steps, we discovered that most of the rocks were unstable as well as sharp. One would tip ten degrees forward as my weight landed on it; the next one tipped forty-five degrees to the right. I could hear the rocks creaking and thudding as jackrabbit came down behind me. I'm too tired for this, I thoutht. We're both too tired. IT y didn't use stealth at that overlook? It'c going to take all my concentration not to break an ankle. I crept down the hillside, applying the full force of my concentration to the treacherous rocks. Soon, I found myself going faster, sensing the cant of each stone as my foot touched it and shifting my weight to adjust for the movement. Though it was a struggle to maintain the necessary mental focus, I found myself enjoying the game of balance. To judge from the decreasing frequency of the thuds and expletives coming from behind me, jackrabbit had discovered the same trick.

  It wasn't until we reached the shelter that I noticed the scrapes crisscrossing the tops of my feet and the tender skin of my arches.

  "I thought I was doing pretty well out there, but this will take some getting used to," I said to jackrabbit. She held her Photon light over my foot while I bandaged a particularly deep scratch. "The nobos say the whole state of Pennsylvania's like that, don't they?"

  "If I remember correctly," she answered grimly, "a fair number of hobos told us we'd never make it through PA barefoot."

  I grinned at her. "We'll make it._Just as long as we don't try to night-hike the whole way."

  Over the next few days, we encountered sporadic patches of the tippy rocks, which jackrabbit jokingly referred to as "asteroid fields." For the most part, though, the trail was smooth, with little elevation gain. We made excellent time, by my standards, hiking twelve- and fourteen-mile days as easily as we had once hiked tens. Jackrabbit aspired to the twenty-mile days that, according to their register entries, most of our sobo friends had hiked through New Jersey, but my lack of ambition and her half-healed injuries still held us back.

  One morning, as we hurried through a grassy section of the trail to make up for a late start, my foot brushed against a hornet in the tall grass. A burning red welt blossomed on the top of my big toe. I treated the sting-at my resourceful sister's suggestion-with some of our baking soda toothpaste. The pain went away almost immediately, but I was worried that it might swell and become difficult to walk on, so I took a Benadryl tablet just for good measure.

  Fifteen minutes later, when the Benadryl kicked in, I remembered why I xvasn't in the habit of taking pills "just for good measure" A dull weariness settled in my limbs; it was hard to pick up my feet high enough to step over small rocks in the trail. Hours seethed to pass while the sun moved only inches up the sky. After lunch, jackrabbit consulted the map.

  "I can't believe it. We're getting nowhere," she exclaimed. "If we're going to make a thirteen today, we'll have to pick up our pace."

  She set off at a rapid stride. I struggled along behind her, feeling as though was trying to run through hip-deep water. At last, we stopped at Mashipa- cong Shelter for our afternoon snack break. I spread my wool shirt on the ground and lay down in a patch of sunlight.

  '
'I)on't get too comfortable;' jackrabbit warned. "We've still got six miles to go to the campsite.-

  "I'm not going to the campsite. I'm staying here:' My voice seemed thick and distant to my own ears.

  ... he hell you are. We've only hiked seven miles today. If we hike seven miles a day, we'll he on the 'frail till March! Besides, this shelter's less than a quarter-mile of}-that road we Just crossed. It'd be too dangerous'.

  "I'll) not feeling good. I'm kind of sick, actually."

  "Oh" She sounded contrite. "Why didn't you tell uie that in the first place?"

  By evening, the underwater feeling of the Benadryl had nearly worn off. Jackrabbit and I crouched by the stove, taking turns feeding twigs into the fire box. Just at dusk, a hunter in full camouflage stepped out of the darkening forest, with a wicked-looking compound bow slung over his shoulder.

  "Are you ladies planning to stay the night here?" he asked.

  "Well, uh.. "

  With our tent clearly visible in the light of the near-full moon, any attempt at denial seemed pointless. Still, we knew that don't tell a stranger where you're spending the rnght was one of the cardinal rules of safety for women on the Trail. Of course, we were already breaking the other: don't camp alone near a road crossing.

  The hunter waited a moment, then continued. "I wouldn't stay here if I was you. There's a minimum security prison 'bout a quarter mile down the road and twenty bears hang out at the dumpsters there every night."

  "Thanks for the warning," I said. "Maybe we'll hike on after supper. 11

  "That's what I'd do if I was you. Have a good evening" He vanished into the woods on the other side of the clearing.

  Jackrabbit and I considered the situation-convicts, bears, and the proximity of the road, versus the idea of night-hiking another six miles to the campsite. New Jersey's exceptionally high bear population made it dangerous to simply hang food bags in trees at night, as we'd done in other states. Instead of mouse hangers, New Jersey shelters came equipped with metal, safe-like bear boxes where hikers could store their food. The next place with a bear box would probably be the campsite where we'd originally planned to stay. In the end, inertia won out. What if we hit a patch of rocks? The idea of nighthiking another "asteroid field" didn't appeal to jackrabbit either. As luck would have it, our encounter with the bow hunter was the most exciting thing that happened that night.

  jackrabbit

  he beauty of the New Jersey ridges surprised me. My only prior experience with the state had been the airport in Newark. These open, grassy summits and the views of lakes and farmland in the valleys hardly seemed like they belonged to the same world, let alone the same state.

  Early one morning, we climbed toward Sunrise Mountain. Several townspeople had told us this was a great place to watch the raptor migration. I realized it was a weekend; we would probably meet a large number of people today. I sighed and reconciled myself to answering the litany of questions again. Sometimes I wished I could make my bare feet invisible.

  We saw the first dayhikers perhaps a half mile from the summit, an elderly Couple walking together. They smiled and wished us well. The man carried a stout walking stick.

  "You-uns best watch for snakes," he told us. "All kinds of rattlers up there on the rocks" And then his glance caught our bare feet. "Barefoot! Well, bless you, girls, I don't know how you do it ..

  "Very carefully," I replied. This routine was old hat by now.

  The dayhikers laughed. "Where are you bound to?"

  "Georgia."

  "Well, I'll be! Two girls a-going to Georgia barefoot. Here's one for the books ... here, would you mind if I took a photo?"

  We struck a pose in the trail, our arms around each others' shoulders and two grimy feet in the air.

  "You-1111S watch for those snakes, alright? You best be double-careful with those feet of yours.

  "We sure will. Have a great day."

  It was scarcely a minute before the next dayhiker hove into view. He was probably in his late fifties, with a shock of white hair and a lean, hawk-like face.

  "Barefoot! Well, as soon as I saw you, I said to myself, there must be some reason for it. I mean, either you're raising money for something, or doing a, a, a, penance, or you're the absolute dumbest pair of lunatics in the U. S. of A!" He hardly paused for breath. "So what's the deal? Why barefoot?-

  "Because we like it," Isis said.

  "No-no-no. There's gotta be a reason for it. Nobody likes going barefoot on rocks!"

  "We do"

  "lint-but ... why?"

  "It feels good." As he stood there, openmouthed, inspiration came to inc. "Imagine you lived in a society where you had to wear gloves all the time. Your hands are delicate and fragile, and you might damage them, after all. Imagine one day you take your gloves of}."

  While he pondered this, we moved on up the trail, walking with as much grace and speed as the sharp, uneven stones allowed.

  Isis

  ver since jackrabbit had returned to the Trail, she'd seemed exceedingly preoccupied with time and distance. "We have to make at least fourteen today," she'd announce as we packed up in the morning, and, when we stopped for a snack break, "this is pathetic. It's ten in the morning and we've only gone three miles!" She complained most bitterly when her own weakness slowed us, but she also took issue with my blase attitude toward pace. At some point, she'd calculated that, in order to cover the 215 miles of Vermont and Massachusetts in the three weeks she was off-trail, I must have averaged less than ten miles a day. When she confronted me with these calculations, I argued that I'd hiked slowly on purpose, so that she wouldn't have too many miles to make up. Still, I had to admit to myself, she had a point; on my own I'd been much more concerned with the view in front of a shelter or its proximity to good blackberry patches than the number of miles I'd hiked to get there.

  Our arguments came to a head one day when we stopped for lunch at a register box that perched like a mailbox beside the junction of a side trail. We took turns reading the register as we ate. The notebook had been left by a nobo named Jester. In a lengthy introduction, he wrote that he'd gotten off the Trail because he felt unwelcome in the Trail community, but he was leaving a register in case he still had any friends who wanted to write a parting message to hint. It didn't seem like he'd made many friends, after all; instead of the usual banter about gear and the weather, every other entry consisted of invective against the nian.

  I pieced together the story from the few cautiously friendly entries. Someone wrote that hiking forty- and fifty-mile days really was pretty impressive, and boasting about it wasn't entirely unmerited. Another person suggested that the insults about other people's paces and challenges to "race to Katahdin" that jester had written in earlier registers could be interpreted as jokes.

  I was trying to formulate a tactful way to say Hike your own hike. Honestly, people. There's no point in doing somethini' just so you can brgc, about it, but there's even less point in letting somebody else's boasting get to you. I deliberated for a minute before deciding to go ahead and write what I was thinking-nobody else in that register seemed to have worried much about tact. As I put the pen to the paper, jackrabbit got to her feet and heaved her pack onto her shoulders.

  "We have to go," she said. "It's already two o'clock."

  "Just a sec, I want to finish with the register."

  "We've been sitting here forty-five minutes. You've had plenty of time to read the register. If we don't start moving now, we'll never make another seven miles before dark"

  I should have just answered, "go ahead, I'll catch up to you," but I was too angry for words. Who did she think she was, telling me where I should go and when? Didn't she realize that she depended on me, and not the other way around? I'd been doing just fine hiking solo-I still would he solo, the thought flashed through my mind, if I had any choice in the matter. That first bitter thought brought a wave of others-jackrabbit played her trump card, telli,; me holy miserable she was in the month she spent off-
trail. Knowin t that, I can't leave her. Not for the rest of the hike, anyway. For the neat fcw hours I damn well can! I slammed the register into its box and hiked away as fast as I could go. I knew that jackrabbit's feet were still tender from her month off the Trail. There was no way she could keep up with me on the sharp gravel of the New Jersey ridges.

  I hiked as fast as I could for the next four miles, fueled by my anger. At one point, I passed a lovely little pond full of fall leaves, and wished briefly that I had a companion to share the view. I snorted. t1 jackrabbit were here, she'd be tellin' rue hou' much time I u'as wastinw lookiaw at the view I hurried on, knowing she might catch up with me if I waited there.

  By the time I reached Culver fire tower, on the summit of a small ridge, I had expended enough energy to calm myself. I sat down to wait. Five or six hawkwatchers with binoculars stood on the tower's platform, and some families of dayhikers had set out picnics on the grass below. A brother and sister from one of the picnicking families, both in their teens, struck up a conversation with Inc. The brother reeled off questions like a practiced interviewer; he asked me how much my pack weighed, how long I expected to spend on the Trail, and how much money it would cost Ine. His sister, a few years younger, stood half-hidden behind him, fidgeting with her watchband and avoiding my eyes, but listening intently to all Iny answers. When her brother finished talking, she glanced up and asked, in a tone of mingled awe and terror, "Are you hiking by yourself?"